Mount Improbable Concepts

Climbing Mount Improbable

by Richard Dawkins and Lalla Ward · 1 Jan 1996 · 309pp · 101,190 words

copyright © 1996 by Lalla Ward All rights reserved First published as a Norton 1997 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dawkins, Richard, 1941— Climbing mount improbable / Richard Dawkins; original drawings by Lalla Ward. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN: 978-0-393-31682-7 1. Natural selection. 2. Evolutionary genetics.

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© K. Eric Drexler, Chris Peterson and Gayle Pergamit. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission from Unbounding the Future: The Nanotechnology Revolution. William Morrow, 1991. CLIMBING MOUNT IMPROBABLE CHAPTER 1 FACING MOUNT RUSHMORE I HAVE JUST LISTENED TO A LECTURE IN WHICH THE topic for discussion was the fig. Not a botanical lecture

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late generation is better than the best you can find in an earlier generation. This, as we shall see in Chapter 3, is what Climbing Mount Improbable means. Figure 1.13 All these vegetables have been bred from the same ancestor, the wild cabbage, Brassica olearacea: (clockwise from top left) Brussels

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does solve. It solves it by breaking the improbability up into small, manageable parts, smearing out the luck needed, going round the back of Mount Improbable and crawling up the gentle slopes, inch by million-year inch. Only God would essay the mad task of leaping up the precipice in a

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is not, in which case he cannot provide an explanation. God should be seen by Fred Hoyle as the ultimate Boeing 747. The height of Mount Improbable stands for the combination of perfection and improbability that is epitomized in eyes and enzyme molecules (and gods capable of designing them). To say that

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? It is the slow, cumulative, one-step-at-a-time, non-random survival of random variants that Darwin called natural selection. The metaphor of Mount Improbable dramatizes the mistake of the sceptics quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Where they went wrong was to keep their eyes fixed on the

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hence life, will follow, more or less inevitably, on any planet in the universe where something equivalent to heredity arises. We have arrived back at Mount Improbable, back to ‘smearing out’ the luck: to taking what looks like an immense amount of luck—the luck needed to make an eye where

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, from any one way of being alive to every other. The metaphor of the islands does not help us here, and the metaphor of Mount Improbable is better. The islands serve the particular purpose of dramatizing the point that the more drastic and freakish the mutation the less likely it is

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up for a pre-evolutionary age when divides were everything and we did not expect to find intermediates. We’ve taken a preliminary look at Mount Improbable and seen the difference between the forbidding cliffs on one side and forgiving slopes on the other. The next two chapters look carefully at

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with which small animals can float suggests that we have only to assume that flying evolved originally in small animals, and the flying peak of Mount Improbable immediately looks less formidable. Very small insects float without wings at all. Slightly larger insects are helped by tiny wing stubs to catch the breeze

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really tiny insects float well enough with no wings at all. The slightly disconcerting result from the point of view of my simple ramp up Mount Improbable was that, at these very small sizes, small wings didn’t seem to help aerodynamic efficiency. Wings didn’t provide useful lift unless they

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the insects, stubs and all, would automatically be carried into the size range where aerodynamic benefits could take over and continue the steady push up Mount Improbable, albeit up a different slope towards a different peak. It’s hard to be sure that models in a wind tunnel really represent what

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research holds a very interesting lesson for us. It teaches us a subtle new way, a kind of sideways diversion, by which paths up Mount Improbable may be found. For vertebrates the evolution of flight was probably a different story because they are mostly larger anyway. True powered flight has evolved

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apparatus of watery living? Why don’t whales and sea-cows regrow gills and lose their lungs? This brings us to another important lesson that Mount Improbable has to teach us. In evolution, ideal outcomes are not the only consideration. It also makes a difference where you start: as in the

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an evolving lineage to go into reverse for a brief while and so expose itself to the opportunity to ascend a previously inaccessible peak of Mount Improbable? This is the kind of question that interested the great geneticist Sewall Wright who, by the way, was the first to use a landscape

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metaphor for evolution, the progenitor of my Mount Improbable. Wright was the American member of the cantankerously warring triumvirate who, in the 1920s and 1930s, founded what we now call neo-Darwinism. (The

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mammals had such a field day of opportunity that some of their lineages ‘relaxed their guard’, went temporarily downhill, and thereby found higher peaks of Mount Improbable from which they would normally have been debarred. Another recipe is transfusions of fresh genes from other places. This is the point that I said

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the creationists’ favourite target, and the star stumbling block for would-be believers in evolution, perched precariously on the summit of the most formidable cliff Mount Improbable has to offer: the eye. Note: After this book had gone to be typeset, J. H. Marden and M. G. Kramer published a fascinating

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study of stoneflies, which suggests yet another possible route up Mount Improbable towards true flapping flight (Marden, J. H., & Kramer, M. G. (1995) ‘Locomotor performance of insects with rudimentary wings’. Nature, 377, 332–4). Stoneflies are

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fossil insects. Maybe wingless ancestors lived on water surfaces and raised their gill plates as sails. There would then have been a smooth ramp up Mount Improbable as the gill plates grew to become progressively more effective sails. As for the next step towards flapping flight on this hypothesis, Marden and Kramer

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also skims along the water surface, but it flaps its wings to do so. Perhaps insects, on their way up to the flying peak of Mount Improbable, passed through a sailing phase like Allocapnia, then a surface flapping phase like Taeniopteryx. It is easy to imagine that light flapping insects buzzing their

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not even William Eberhard, whose diverting book, Sexual Selection and Animal Genitalia, is my source for this information. If we think of the plain below Mount Improbable as peopled by ancestral animals that were totally unaffected by light, the non-directional light-sensitive skins of starfish and leeches (and butterfly genitals) are

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do, in a rudimentary way. Such pigments abound, for all sorts of purposes other than trapping light. The first faltering steps up the slopes of Mount Improbable would have consisted in the gradual improvement of pigment molecules. There is a shallow, continuous ramp of improvement—easy to climb in small steps. This

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the same trick of increasing the number of layers of pigment-laced membranes through which a photon must pass if it would escape untrapped. From Mount Improbable’s point of view, the important point is that one more layer marginally improves the chance of trapping photons no matter how many, or

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firing and which are not, the brain can detect the direction from which the light is coming. From the point of view of climbing Mount Improbable, what matters is that there is a continuous evolutionary gradation—a smooth incline up the mountain—connecting animals with a flat carpet of photocells to

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marine snail in Figure 5.8b, are perhaps better described as deep cups than true pinholes. They illustrate the smoothness of this particular gradient up Mount Improbable. Figure 5.8 A range of invertebrate eyes that illustrate approaches to the formation of crude but effective images: (a) Nautilus’s pinhole eye; (

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wonderful computer to come from, if not from a complicated miracle? Is this where we meet our Waterloo: an inevitable precipice in our ascent up Mount Improbable? Remarkably, the answer is no. The computer in the diagram is just an imaginary creation to emphasize the apparent complexity of the task if you

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it will end up. You could even end up at different culmination points on different evolutionary runs, because there could be alternative accessible peaks of Mount Improbable. We could run our eye model in evolution mode too, and it would make a vivid demonstration. But actually you don’t learn much

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more by letting the model evolve than you would learn by exploring, more systematically, where the upward path(s) on Mount Improbable lead(s). From a given starting point, a path which goes ever upward, never downward, is the path that natural selection would follow. If

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that rudimentary, imperfect adjustments would be better than nothing, so there is no difficulty in piecing together an ancestral series following a smooth path up Mount Improbable. In order to focus rays that are coming from a very distant target, you need a weaker lens than to focus rays that are coming

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other purpose, incidentally improve the focus of the lens. This opens up a broad highway for gentle improvement all the way up the slopes of Mount Improbable, which could culminate in either the mammal or the chameleon method of changing the focus. Changing the aperture—the size of the hole through which

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early evolution of the variable pupil ceases to be a problem. There are lots of gentle paths to be followed up the lower slopes of Mount Improbable. The iris diaphragm is no more an impenetrable evolutionary barrier than is the anal sphincter. Perhaps the most important quantity that needs to be

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and the lens develops as a mass of colourless, transparent cells. Both these two methods of lens development lend themselves to the same kind of Mount Improbable climb as we’ve already undertaken for the vitreous mass eye of the worm. Lenses, like eyes themselves, seem to have evolved many times independently

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the fovea. Numbers of photocells, and differentiation of photocells into more than one type, present no special problems from the point of view of climbing Mount Improbable. Both kinds of improvement obviously constitute smooth gradients up the mountain. Big retinas see better than small retinas. You can fit more photocells in, and

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equivalent of a fovea. Using this clever trick, jumping spiders have carried the lens eye to a respectable little peak in their local area of Mount Improbable. Figure 5.17 Jumping spider. Figure 5.18 Curved mirror solutions to the problem of forming images: (a) reflecting telescope; (b) Gigantocypris, a large

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kingdom). But how did the compound eye evolve in the first place? What do we find on the lower slopes of this particular peak of Mount Improbable? Once again we may be helped by looking around the modern animal kingdom. Outside the arthropods (insects, crustaceans and their kin), compound eyes are

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as evolutionary historians because they also include among their number some primitive eyes which look like plausible intermediates strung out along the lower slopes of Mount Improbable leading to a compound-eye peak. The eyes in Figure 5.24 come from two different worm species. Once again, these are not ancestors,

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be prepared to modify them, or even drop them altogether, when necessary. This is not the first occasion when the reader will have noticed that Mount Improbable, for all that it has a singular name like the Jungfrau, is actually a more complicated, multiple-peaked affair. Figure 5.30 The eye

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region of the Mount Improbable range: Michael Land’s landscape of eye evolution. That other great authority on animal eyes, Dan Nilsson, who also read the chapter in draft,

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our imagination, cannot be considered real. CHAPTER 6 THE MUSEUM OF ALL SHELLS NATURAL SELECTION IS THE PRESSURE THAT DRIVES evolution up the slopes of Mount Improbable. Pressure really is rather a good metaphor. We speak of ‘selection pressure’, and you can almost feel it pushing a species to evolve, shoving

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to one another. Selection pressures, moreover, can be ‘strong’ or ‘weak’, and the ordinary-language meanings of these words fit well. The particular path up Mount Improbable that a lineage takes will be influenced by lots of different selection pressures, pushing and tugging in different directions and with different strengths, sometimes cooperating

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with each other, sometimes opposing. But pressure isn’t the end of the story. The path chosen up Mount Improbable will depend, too, on the shapes of the slopes. There are selection pressures, pushing and tugging in an assortment of directions and strengths, but there

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and slow antelopes—that is, if differences in running speed are purely environmentally determined—no evolutionary business will result. In the direction of improved speed, Mount Improbable might present no slope to climb. Now we come to a piece of genuine uncertainty and a spectrum of opinion among biologists. At one extreme

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can’t have them because there never were mutant wing stubs for natural selection to work upon. The controversy is more sophisticated than that, and Mount Improbable, even in its multiple-peaked version, isn’t a powerful enough metaphor to explore it. We need a new metaphor, using the kind of

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imagination that mathematicians enjoy although we shan’t use explicit mathematical symbols. It will make more demands on us than Mount Improbable, but it is worth it. In The Blind Watchmaker I made brief excursions into what I variously called ‘genetic space’, ‘biomorph land’ and ‘Making

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trajectories, tunnelling in different directions through different regions of the multi-dimensional museum (notice how far we have come from the very different metaphor of Mount Improbable). Now the controversy with which we began can be re-expressed as follows. Some biologists feel that as you walk the long corridors of the

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flowers resembled true female flowers in all respects, including depth. Figs and fig wasps occupy the high ground of evolutionary achievement: a spectacular pinnacle of Mount Improbable. Their relationship is almost ludicrously tortuous and subtle. It cries out for interpretation in the language of deliberate, conscious, Machiavellian calculation. Yet it is

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problems can be solved, and even the most precipitous heights can be scaled, if only a slow, gradual, step-by-step pathway can be found. Mount Improbable cannot be assaulted. Gradually, if not always slowly, it must be climbed. BIBLIOGRAPHY BOOKS REFERRED TO AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Adams, D. (1989)

The Blind Watchmaker; Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

by Richard Dawkins · 1 Jan 1986 · 420pp · 143,881 words

languages. Its sequel, The Extended Phenotype, followed in 1982. His other bestsellers include The Blind Watchmaker (1986; Penguin, 1988), River Out of Eden (1995), Climbing Mount Improbable (1996; Penguin, 1997), Unweaving the Rainbow (Penguin, 1999) and The Ancestor’s Tale (2004). Richard Dawkins won both the Royal Society of Literature Award and

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on the perennially fascinating topic of evolutionary design. But that would be another book. Now that I think of it, it would be called Climbing Mount Improbable (Penguin, 1996). Although each of the two books is self-sufficient and can be read on its own, it is also true that either could

Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist

by Richard Dawkins · 15 Mar 2017 · 420pp · 130,714 words

in this spirit that I chose ‘The fortyfold path to enlightenment’ as my title for the chapter on the evolution of the eye in Climbing Mount Improbable. A whole chapter was necessary because, from William Paley on, the eye has been such a favourite of creationists seeking to apply what I called

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scars and the like. And what could the ‘selector’ be but some version of what Darwin proposed? *9 I later used the metaphor of Climbing Mount Improbable in the book of that name. A complex piece of well-designed machinery such as an eye sits high on a peak of

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Mount Improbable. One side of the mountain is a sheer precipice, impossible to scale in a single leap – saltation. But on the other side of the mountain

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selection. Did he really not understand the impossibility of explaining the complex illusion of design by saltation – leaping from the bottom to the top of Mount Improbable in a single bound? It seems hard to credit. Gould was deeply interested in, and knowledgeable about, history. He was historically correct in asserting that

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successors have provided us with a luminously plausible explanation for the mechanism that propels evolution up the graded slopes, the process I have dubbed ‘Climbing Mount Improbable’. Natural selection is not some desperate last resort of a theory. It is an idea whose plausibility and power hit you between the eyes with

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the question of its own origin. From the lowlands of primeval simplicity, natural selection gradually and steadily ramps its way up the gentle slopes of Mount Improbable until, after sufficient geological time, the end product of evolution is an object such as an eye or a heart – something of such an elevated

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a single chance event. The metaphor has been advanced of a slow climb up the gentle slopes of what has somewhat over-dramatically been called “Mount Improbable”, sir.’ ‘Jarvis, that’s a doosra*2 of an idea, and I think I’m beginning to get my eye in for it. But I

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) Dawkins, Richard, The Blind Watchmaker (London, Longman, 1986) Dawkins, Richard, Brief Candle in the Dark: my life in science (London, Bantam, 2015) Dawkins, Richard, Climbing Mount Improbable (London, Viking, 1996) Dawkins, Richard, A Devil’s Chaplain (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003) Dawkins, Richard, The Extended Phenotype (London, Oxford University Press, 1982) Dawkins, Richard

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of science and religion (London, Bantam, 2005) Also by Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene The Extended Phenotype The Blind Watchmaker River Out of Eden Climbing Mount Improbable Unweaving the Rainbow A Devil’s Chaplain The Ancestor’s Tale The God Delusion The Greatest Show on Earth The Magic of Reality (with Dave

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fame with his iconic work of 1976, The Selfish Gene, which he followed with a string of prestigious bestselling books including The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, The Ancestor’s Tale and The God Delusion. He is also the author of the anthology A Devil’s Chaplain and two volumes of autobiography

The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution

by Richard Dawkins · 1 Jan 2004 · 734pp · 244,010 words

when we get to Canterbury. * I would have included a tale about this if I had not already done it in two chapters of Climbing Mount Improbable, 'Pollen Grains and Magic Bullets', and 'A Garden Inclosed'. * Apart from the rather insignificant 13 species of single-celled glaucophytes, which seem to be the

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eye' has evolved independently between 40 and 60 times around the animal kingdom. This inspired my chapter called 'The Fortyfold Path to Enlightenment' in Climbing Mount Improbable, so I won't repeat myself here, except to say that Professor Michael Land of Sussex University, our leading expert on the comparative zoology of

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interesting. I suspect that we'd find certain potential evolutionary pathways which life is 'eager' to go down. Other pathways have more 'resistance'. In Climbing Mount Improbable, I developed the analogy of a huge museum of all life, both real and conceivable, with corridors going off in many dimensions and representing evolutionary

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that a human engineer would admire as complex and elegant become more complex, more elegant, and more redolent of the illusion of design.* In Climbing Mount Improbable I distinguished designed from 'designoid' (pronounced design-oid, not dezzig-noid). Spectacular feats of designoid engineering, such as the eye of a buzzard, the ear

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) The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2nd edn. [70] DAWKINS, R. (1995) River Out of Eden. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. London. [71] DAWKINS, R. (1996) Climbing Mount Improbable. Viking. London. [72] DAWKINS, R. (1998) Unweaving the Rainbow. Penguin, London. [73] DAWKINS. R. (2003) A Devil's Chaplain. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. London. [74] DAWKINS, R

The God Delusion

by Richard Dawkins · 12 Sep 2006 · 478pp · 142,608 words

, truly magisterial.” —Ian McEwan, author of Atonement Books by Richard Dawkins THE SELFISH GENE THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE THE BLIND WATCHMAKER RIVER OUT OF EDEN CLIMBING MOUNT IMPROBABLE UNWEAVING THE RAINBOW A DEVIL’S CHAPLAIN THE ANCESTOR’S TALE THE GOD DELUSION Richard Dawkins THE GOD DELUSION A MARINER BOOK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

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pronoun) insists on treating the genesis of statistical improbability as a single, one-off event. He doesn’t understand the power of accumulation. In Climbing Mount Improbable, I expressed the point in a parable. One side of the mountain is a sheer cliff, impossible to climb, but on the other side is

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lock of life is a ‘getting warmer, getting cooler, getting warmer’ Hunt the Slipper device. Real life seeks the gentle slopes at the back of Mount Improbable, while creationists are blind to all but the daunting precipice at the front. Darwin devoted an entire chapter of the Origin of Species to ‘Difficulties

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effortless explanation of exactly how the eye evolved by gradual degrees. Darwin may not have used the phrase ‘irreducible complexity’, or ‘the smooth gradient up Mount Improbable’, but he clearly understood the principle of both. ‘What is the use of half an eye?’ and ‘What is the use of half a wing

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100 per cent. The forests are replete with gliding or parachuting animals illustrating, in practice, every step of the way up that particular slope of Mount Improbable. By analogy with the trees of different height, it is easy to imagine situations in which half an eye would save the life of an

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all better than no eye at all, and all lie on a continuous and shallow slope up Mount Improbable, with our eyes near a peak – not the highest peak but a high one. In Climbing Mount Improbable, I devoted a whole chapter each to the eye and the wing, demonstrating how easy it was

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be too dogmatically confident. Maybe there is something out there in nature that really does preclude, by its genuinely irreducible complexity, the smooth gradient of Mount Improbable. The creationists are right that, if genuinely irreducible complexity could be properly demonstrated, it would wreck Darwin’s theory. Darwin himself said as much: ‘If

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dinosaurs’. Gaps, by default in the mind of the creationist, are filled by God. The same applies to all apparent precipices on the massif of Mount Improbable, where the graded slope is not immediately obvious or is otherwise overlooked. Areas where there is a lack of data, or a lack of understanding

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and working before the flagellar motor evolved. Commandeering existing mechanisms is an obvious way in which an apparently irreducibly complex piece of apparatus could climb Mount Improbable. A lot more work needs to be done, of course, and I’m sure it will be. Such work would never be done if scientists

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: W. H. Freeman. Dawkins, R. (1986). The Blind Watchmaker. Harlow: Longman. Dawkins, R. (1995). River Out of Eden. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Dawkins, R. (1996). Climbing Mount Improbable. New York: Norton. Dawkins, R. (1998). Unweaving the Rainbow. London: Penguin. Dawkins, R. (2003). A Devil’s Chaplain: Selected Essays. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Dennett, D

The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

by Richard Dawkins · 1 Jan 1982 · 506pp · 152,049 words

audience. The Selfish Gene (1976; second edition 1989) was followed by The Extended Phenotype (1982), The Blind Watchmaker (1986), River Out of Eden (1995), Climbing Mount Improbable (1996), and Unweaving the Rainbow (1998). In 1991 he gave the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures. He has won many literary and scientific awards, including the

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as a universal truth. In Man and Beast Revisited (eds M. H. Robinson & L. Tiger), pp. 23–39. Washington: Smithsonian Institution. Dawkins, R. (1996). Climbing Mount Improbable. New York: Norton. Dawkins, R. (1998). Unweaving the Rainbow. London: Penguin. Dennett, D. (1995). Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. New York: Simon & Schuster. Depew, D. J

The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

by Christopher Hitchens · 14 Jun 2007 · 740pp · 236,681 words

anything supernatural) of our species and of others. It will be a long time before his books—The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, and Climbing Mount Improbable among many others—are superseded as works of explication and indeed innovation in their field. Professor Dawkins reminds us that evolution by natural selection is

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pronoun) insists on treating the genesis of statistical improbability as a single, one-off event. He doesn’t understand the power of accumulation. In Climbing Mount Improbable, I expressed the point in a parable. One side of the mountain is a sheer cliff, impossible to climb, but on the other side is

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lock of life is a “getting warmer, getting cooler, getting warmer” Hunt the Slipper device. Real life seeks the gentle slopes at the back of Mount Improbable, while Creationists are blind to all but the daunting precipice at the front. Darwin devoted an entire chapter of the Origin of Species to “Difficulties

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effortless explanation of exactly how the eye evolved by gradual degrees. Darwin may not have used the phrase “irreducible complexity,” or “the smooth gradient up Mount Improbable,” but he clearly understood the principle of both. “What is the use of half an eye?” and “What is the use of half a wing

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to 100 percent. The forests are replete with gliding or parachuting animals illustrating, in practice, every step of the way up that particular slope of Mount Improbable. By analogy with the trees of different height, it is easy to imagine situations in which half an eye would save the life of an

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all better than no eye at all, and all lie on a continuous and shallow slope up Mount Improbable, with our eyes near a peak—not the highest peak but a high one. In Climbing Mount Improbable, I devoted a whole chapter each to the eye and the wing, demonstrating how easy it was

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be too dogmatically confident. Maybe there is something out there in nature that really does preclude, by its genuinely irreducible complexity, the smooth gradient of Mount Improbable. The creationists are right that, if genuinely irreducible complexity could be properly demonstrated, it would wreck Darwin’s theory. Darwin himself said as much: “If

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dinosaurs’. Gaps, by default in the mind of the creationist, are filled by God. The same applies to all apparent precipices on the massif of Mount Improbable, where the graded slope is not immediately obvious or is otherwise overlooked. Areas where there is a lack of data, or a lack of understanding

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and working before the flagellar motor evolved. Commandeering existing mechanisms is an obvious way in which an apparently irreducibly complex piece of apparatus could climb Mount Improbable. A lot more work needs to be done, of course, and I’m sure it will be. Such work would never be done if scientists

The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

by Richard Dawkins · 21 Sep 2009

Also by Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene The Extended Phenotype The Blind Watchmaker River Out of Eden Climbing Mount Improbable Unweaving the Rainbow A Devil’s Chaplain The Ancestor’s Tale The God Delusion THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH THE EVIDENCE FOR EVOLUTION RICHARD DAWKINS

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to identify, and dissolve, the main barriers to understanding. These books, The Blind Watchmaker, River Out of Eden and (my favourite of the three) Climbing Mount Improbable, answered questions like, ‘What is the use of half an eye?’ ‘What is the use of half a wing?’ ‘How can natural selection work, given

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creatures resembling arthropods. I have explained the arthromorphs in detail, along with the biomorphs, ‘conchomorphs’ (computer molluscs) and other programs in this vein, in Climbing Mount Improbable. As it happens, the mathematics of shell embryology are well understood, so artificial selection using my ‘conchomorph’ program is capable of generating extremely lifelike forms

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my own ‘computer biomorphs’ and ‘arthromorphs’ (see Chapter 2), Dr Simonyi goes on: ‘The artificial creatures that you [programmed for The Blind Watchmaker and Climbing Mount Improbable] are all described by recipes, not by blueprint – a blueprint would be just a jumble of vectors of black lines – can you imagine trying to

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improbability and diversity, peaks whose height and range seem to know no limit, the metaphorical mountain that I have called ‘Mount Improbable’. The improbability pump of natural selection, driving living complexity up ‘Mount Improbable’, is a kind of statistical equivalent of the sun’s energy raising water to the top of a conventional mountain

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to some feature that they possess. I am conjecturing that it is something about their embryology that makes them evolvable. In the chapter of Climbing Mount Improbable entitled ‘Kaleidoscopic Embryos’ I offered various suggestions for specific features that make for evolvability, including constraints of symmetry, and including modular architectures such as a

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first seem paradoxical that a constraint should increase the evolutionary versatility of a clade. The reason is spelled out in the same chapter of Climbing Mount Improbable, ‘Kaleidoscopic Embryos’. APPENDIX THE HISTORY-DENIERS At irregular but frequent intervals since 1982, Gallup, America’s best-known polling organization, has been sampling the national

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2006) and The Extended Phenotype (rev. edn 1999). p. vii My next three books: The Blind Watchmaker (1986), River Out of Eden (1995) and Climbing Mount Improbable (1996). p. vii My largest book: The Ancestor’s Tale (2004). CHAPTER 1: ONLY A THEORY? p. 5 In 2004 we wrote a joint article

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. E. Langton, ed., Artificial Life, 201–20. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley. Dawkins, R. 1995. River Out of Eden. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Dawkins, R. 1996. Climbing Mount Improbable. London: Viking. Dawkins, R. 1998. Unweaving the Rainbow. London: Penguin. Dawkins, R. 1999. The Extended Phenotype, rev. edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dawkins, R. 2004

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, 138, 266–7 CIPA (congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis), 394 Clack, Jenny, 167 clade selection, 424–5 cladists, 159–60 climate change, 368 Climbing Mount Improbable, 41, 216n, 416, 425 clocks: carbon-14, 103–6; molecular, 107, 330–6; radioactive, 87, 91–8, 101–3, 106; timescales, 85–8; tree rings

Unweaving the Rainbow

by Richard Dawkins · 7 Aug 2011 · 339pp · 112,979 words

what sense can a gene be selfish?' 'What exactly flows down the River Out of Eden?' I still spell out on demand the meaning of Mount Improbable and how slowly and gradually it is climbed. Our language must strive to enlighten and explain, and if we fail to convey our meaning by

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, a change so large that, in extreme cases, its possessor would be classified in a different species from its parents. In my previous book, Climbing Mount Improbable, I reproduced a photograph from a newspaper of a toad with eyes in the roof of its mouth. If this photograph is genuine (a big

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they improve the acuity of a hawk's eyesight. They are the ones that first occur to us when we think of Darwinism. In Climbing Mount Improbable I explained that an elephant's DNA and a virus's are both 'Copy Me' programmes. The difference is that one of them has an

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) The Selfish Gene. Second Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 32. Dawkins, R. (1995) River Out of Eden. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 33. Dawkins, R. (1996) Climbing Mount Improbable. New York: Norton. 34. Dawkins, R. (1998) The values of science and the science of values. In J. Ree & C. W. C. Williams (eds.), The

Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think

by Alan Grafen; Mark Ridley · 1 Jan 2006 · 286pp · 90,530 words

and literary abilities in a string of best-sellers: The Extended Phenotype (intended primarily for fellow biologists), The Blind Watchmaker, River Out of Eden, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow, and The Ancestor’s Tale. A collection of his essays was published as A Devil’s Chaplain. Increasingly involved in public debate

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theme is an attention to adaptive complexity as the paramount phenomenon in need of an explanation, most forcibly expressed in The Blind Watchmaker and Climbing Mount Improbable. In the case of life, we have the remarkable adaptations of living things: echolocation, camouflage, the vertebrate eye, and countless other ‘organs of extreme perfection

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, there may be a one-way ratchet of progressive innovation in evolution.22 Dawkins has always made brilliant use of metaphor—selfish gene, blind watchmaker, mount improbable—and metaphor is much involved in the thinking about progress. In The Blind Watchmaker, the metaphor of bigger and bigger on-board computers (aka brains

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their fellows leave more descendants. Since this process iterates, we expect selection to build a fit between organism and environment. The Blind Watchmaker and Climbing Mount Improbable richly document wonderful examples of adaptive design built this way. So how can an evolutionary understanding of our minds and personalities be reconciled with deep

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default conclusion is drawn: ‘Right, then, the alternative theory, “intelligent design”, wins by default.’ At least three of Richard’s books—The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, and River Out of Eden—are direct challenges to creationists’ arguments, although presented not as straight debunking works, but as science-advancing treatises on evolutionary

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aggressive new breed of literary agent led by John Brockman. Dawkins himself promptly produced three wonderful books in four years—River Out of Eden, Climbing Mount Improbable, and Unweaving the Rainbow. Even as television gave up on many aspects of science, and newspapers retreated to covering technology, environmental scares, and popular psychology

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, Robert, 146 Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan, 239-40 Charles, Prince of Wales, 154 Christianity, 146, 236-7 chromosomes, 33, 52-3, 55, 62, 109, 150, 208 Climbing Mount Improbable (Dawkins), 131, 215, 232, 269 cognitive science, 111, 130, 131, 132, 133-4, 135, I4I, 215-16, 221-2 communication, 28-30, 39, 58-61